Toshl Finance Blog

To The Web and Beyond: Enhanced Budgets, History Graphs and Global Setting for Planned Expenses

Posted on May 13, 2013

Web, the final frontier. These are the voyages of Toshl Finance and it’s continuing mission to improve your finances and boldly budget like no one has ever budgeted before. In the previous episodes you’ve seen updates to our mobile apps with enhanced budgets. This time they’re coming to the big screen, to our toshl.com web app. But we’ve added and extra ingredient to the concussion: Budget History Graphs.

Budget History Graphs

Ever wondered what was your budget performance in the previous months? It was possible to check before, but the list of previous months could be rather dry. We’ve decided to enhance that and add a little flare with a graph of budget history for the previous months. See how you did, click on the individual month and even check out details for that month.

Expenses Included in the Budget

It’s vital to know which expenses are included in the budget to know where you really went overboard. Now you can have them all listed in the individual budget. Once a budget is selected you’ll see an arrow next to the title, just click it and the list of all the expenses included in the budget will unfold below, just like in the expenses timeline. Too much information? Click it again and the list will collapse again. Toshl will remember your choice for every budget so you won’t be bothered when you don’t need to be.

Show or Hide Planned Expenses in All Graphs and Sums

When it comes to your finances you can’t just live in the moment all the time. Sometimes you need to take a good look into what will be going on in your financial future. With Toshl you can add your regular bills as repeating expenses or just add individual expenses to future dates for things you already know you will need to purchase in the future.

But when it comes to displaying that information you can have a bit of a dilemma. Do I want to see the state of my finances right now, or include all my expectations for the rest of the month as well? Now you can choose. Just click on the name of the month and on the bottom of the overlay you’ll see “Include planned expenses in graphs and sums” and an ON/OFF button next to it. When it’s ON all your future expenses will be included in the graphs, expense, income and balance sums, as well as the budgets.

It’s a global setting for the whole site so you only need to click once and we’ll remember your preference for the next time you log in.

Minor enhancements

We’ve fixed and improved a great number of other things you might not notice at first glance, but count nonetheless. When you log in with Google we’ll remember you if you remain logged in with Google, so you need not click the log in button every time. Chinese characters again work well in exported PDFs, Hebrew is nicer in the graphs, email notifications work better and the list of enhancements goes on and on way past the event horizon.

Try it all out on toshl.com

Posted in Announcements

Toshl Finance for iPhone Out Now with Search, 165 Auto-refreshed Currencies, Improved Budgets and in 11 Languages

Posted on April 26, 2013

The new Toshl Finance for iOS has been confirmed and released on the App Store. We’ve added a lot of new features, fine-tuned existing ones and made the whole thing work faster. Just try tapping add expense for example. If the list of features seems familiar from the previous blog posts, it’s not a coincidence. We’ve now reached feature parity among the mobile apps we’re actively developing.

Search

You can now search your expenses and incomes by tags, description, amount. Type it in, tap and there you go. If you’d like to search in longer periods of time, don’t forget to first change the timespan to “all time” or some timespan of that nature.

You can find the search on any expense/income list. Just scroll up a bit and you’ll find it hidden below the title bar.

Use ALL The Currencies

We’ve made some big changes when it comes to handling foreign currencies. We previously had about 30 currencies pre-entered and with daily updated exchange rates. The rest could be added as a custom currency. Now we’ve greatly expanded that list. Toshl now supports 165 currencies with exchange rates updated daily. We’ve got everything from the Afghan Afgani to the Zimbabwean Dollar. There’s even support for Bitcoin (BTC) if you’re into virtual currencies and the thrilling sport of financial bubble surfing. If you still can’t find your currency on the list among all these, you can still use a custom currency. We dare you. ;)

As the list of currencies got a lot longer we’ve also added search through currencies as well as a nicer currency settings screen so it’s easy to differentiate between the currently active currency and your main currency. Best of all, these settings also sync with the web app now so you’ll never be caught with your pants down when trying to enter an expense during international travel. Unless that’s your thing.

Navigation improvements & facelift

You can now switch between the list of expenses by time and the list by tags using a neat little switch on the top of the list. You’ll find it right next to the search bar. We hope it will help people find and understand this switching more easily than before with the swiping between the two modes. We’ve also made the time span icon a bit more minimal and replaced the budget icon.

List of expenses included in the budget

Budgets are great to remind you where your money went, but sometimes you just want to go WTF?!, why is this budget so low already? Now you can check. In the budget details, you’ll find a list of included expenses enabling you to see exactly where that budget vanished to and which expenses are the culprits.

Improved budget history

Knowing how you did with a budget in the months before and where you should improve is also very important. We’ve improved the history view, made the list nicer, but most importantly, you can see the details of the budgets from the past. You can even see which expenses were included in them.

Localisation

At Toshl we have always aspired to treat citizens of the world equally and now we’ve taken a step further towards living up to our ideals. With your help we have localised the app into many different languages. The biggest thanks goes to the loyal users of Toshl who have helped to translate the app into their own languages.

Together we will continue to improve the translations, add some parts that are perhaps missing and bring new supported languages to the app. You can help out too by visiting translate.toshl.com. There, we have set up a super simple translation interface, where you can fill in the blanks for your language, even if it is just a few sentences at a time.

From today on Toshl for iOS will be available in Chinese (China – simplified), Chinese (Taiwan – traditional), Czech, English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

Sadly we are still unable to use Toshl on iOS in the Toshl team’s native Slovenian, since Apple still hasn’t started supporting the Slovenian language in iOS.

Some of the other translations are already in progress and hopefully, with your help, we’ll be able to publish them soon.

Performance optimisation & bug fixes

As always, we’ve worked on making Toshl Finance a lot quicker, stabler and error free. Some screens load a bit differently now. We’ve achieved significant improvements on the Add expense screen, especially on older devices. If you’re like us and compete with the credit card reader in shops to see if you can enter the expense faster than it can charge your card, this will greatly help with achieving victory every time.

Get Toshl Finance for iOS from the App Store

Posted in Announcements

Search, New Navigation and Better Budgets coming to Android.

Posted on April 18, 2013

An updated Toshl Finance for Android app is now roaming the pages of Google Play. First thing you’ll notice is the new navigation style. Much cleaner, leaner, Android 4-like and most importantly, swipable left and right. But if you can swipe between expenses, incomes, sum up, budgets, where did the tag list go?

We’ve got you covered there too, we’ve made a new switcher to seamlessly switch between the timeline view and the view by tags. You can find it on the bottom right, marked with the familiar tag icon.

Search

You can now search your expenses and incomes by tags, description, amount and currency. Type it in, tap and there you go. If you’d like to search in longer periods of time, don’t forget to first change the timespan to “all time” or some timespan of that nature.

List of expenses included in the budget

Improved budget history

Knowing how you did with a budgets in the months before and where you should improve is also very important. We’ve improved the history view, made the list nicer, but most important, you can see the details of the budgets from the past. You can even see which expenses were included in them.

Localisation

From today on Toshl for Android will be available in English, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, Slovenian and Spanish. Some of the other translations are already in progress and hopefully, with your help, we’ll be able to publish them soon.

Performance optimisation & bug fixes

As always we’ve worked on making Toshl Finance a lot quicker, stabler and error free. Hopefully it will quickly show.

Download Toshl Finance from Google Play

You can also download the APK file directly from our servers.

Posted in Announcements

Merge, Add and Remove Multiple Tags

Posted on March 27, 2013

When you’re starting to track your personal finances, you sometimes need a try or two to know what you really want. For example, do you want to track spending with the names of all the restaurants or just keep it all under the food tag? To make adapting your system easier, we have now added simple tools to merge, add and remove tags on toshl.com.

Update: This is an outdated version of the article for the old Toshl web app. Please see the updated version here: Edit Categories and Tags (Web App)

How do I merge tags?

Let’s say you no longer wish to track tags “food” and “restaurants” separately. Simply go to Tags in your account and find the Merge expense tags below.

Then select “food” and “restaurant” from the dropdown menu, review them and then choose a name for the new, merged, tag. Since I’m feeling very utilitarian today, the new food tag shall be named “human fuel”.

If you wish, you can also check which expenses will be affected. The list will open in a new window and won’t interrupt your process.

All you have to do next is click Merge, confirm and there you go; all your “food” and “restaurants” are belong to “human fuel”. ;)

Toshl monsters sometimes take merging too far.

How do I add tags to multiple expenses?

Go to Tags in your Expenses or Income section and click on the Add expense tags below.

You can add tags to expenses with an existing tag, for example you want all the expenses tagged with “burek” (delicious Balkan pastry) to also be tagged with “food”.

Another way of using this functionality is to add a tag to all expenses within a date range. For example, I went on holiday to the Iranian city of Esfahan from 12th to the 25th of March 2013. I can then easily tag all the expenses within that range with the tag “Iran 2013”, so I’ll know exactly how much I spent during my travel there.

Review the expenses that this tag addition will affect, click Add tags, confirm and there you go. If you followed our example you can then see how much you spent in Iran in 2013 and know not to buy more than two silk carpets the next time you’re around.

How do I remove tags from multiple expenses?

As always, go to Tags and find the Remove expense tags below.

Select the tag you wish to remove from the dropdown menu. With expenses where there are multiple tags, the tag will simply be removed once you hit the Remove button. If there are some expenses, repeating expenses or budgets where the tag you selected for removal is the only one, then we’ll ask you what to do with those. You can either keep them and they will be left as they are, or you can choose to delete them, in which case the expenses and budgets themselves will be deleted. It cannot be undone, so tread with caution.

Review the expenses that will be affected, click remove, confirm and those pesky redundant no-good expense tags shall bother you no more.

These tools are only available in our web app on toshl.com. They are not something you would use every day and would add unnecessary complexity to our mobile apps. So you can make the changes that you wish on toshl.com and after you’ve made your modifications, sync your Toshl Finance phone app. All the changes you have made will be reflected there.

All these instructions above work just the same for income tags, although if you’re like us, you will try to avoid mass removal of income. ;)

Posted in Announcements, Tips & Tricks, Tutorials

Nokia, It Was a Fun Ride, But WeeGo Off Symbian and MeeGo

Posted on March 7, 2013

Today we have released an update of Toshl Finance for Symbian^3 containing some fixes to make it more reliable and quicker. We’ll soon be releasing a similar update for the MeeGo platform. These will be the last releases of Toshl Finance for these two platforms. It has been quite a ride, but I think we need to start seeing other platforms.

Toshl remains available on Symbian and MeeGo

Toshl will remain available on both platforms and will continue to function normally in the future, including sync with toshl.com and all the other goodies. You can download the Toshl Finance app on the Nokia Store. The only thing that changes is that Symbian and MeeGo versions won’t be getting new features as they become available on other platforms.

You can also use Toshl Finance on iOS, Android or Windows Phone or the Web and once you log in, all the data that you entered or Symbian (or any other device) will automatically be available there.

Why we aren’t developing new features on Symbian and MeeGo

It’s quite simple really, Symbian has recently been officially discontinued few months ago, but the writing has been on the wall for both Symbian and MeeGo ever since Stephen Elop released the burning platform memo and announced the transition to Windows Phone in 2011. Symbian, while great in its heyday, never completely got it’s edge back after the release of iPhone and later Android and was on a doomed trajectory for a while while still enjoying relatively high market share around the world.

MeeGo was and is a great mobile operating system with some user experience innovations, which other mobile OS makers can still learn from today. Sadly it was a late entrant to the platform wars and never got the proper wind in it’s sails it required from Nokia. For years Nokia had a slightly schizophrenic platform strategy instead of focusing on one future platform. Which probably should have been MeeGo at the time. Perhaps a more apt metaphor that Elop could use, would be that they were standing on multiple burning platforms and instead of deciding which platform to put out the fire on, they decided to jump into the waters of Windows Phone and Microsoft collaboration.

Agree or disagree, we could debate the merits of those strategic decisions for days. During coffee breaks at Toshl, we often do. The fact remains though, Symbian and MeeGo market share is falling fast and with it the user base of people who could use applications like ours. We need to focus on platforms where growth is strong and a viable future remains.

Godspeed Nokia and Windows Phone

What we’ve always appreciated about Nokia though is that they always had regional representatives you could talk to, cared about localisations and were ready to cooperate with marketing campaigns as well. This is sadly changing now as their orientation becomes more and more US-centric as software development has shifted largely to Microsoft and cost-cutting takes place.

We certainly hope Nokia’s new Windows Phones and the new strategy grow successful. We genuinely like the Windows Phone OS and Toshl Finance on Windows Phone is popular, well polished and continues to be high on our roadmap. It also enables us to develop nifty little things like live tiles that show how your budgets and balance move as time goes by, right on the home screen.

What’s up with the Toshl Symbian & MeeGo developers?

Nejc Pintar, our erstwhile Qt developer, is moving on to iOS development, coding the upcoming Toonia Colorbook iPad app. While that’s occupying him during work hours he remains an avid Qt supporter in his free time and continues to participate in the Qt community.

So farewell Symbian, MeeGo and thanks for all the (sail)fish.

Posted in Announcements